


Simple Things

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Drama, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-05
Updated: 2012-04-05
Packaged: 2017-11-03 02:34:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roy will recommence romancing Edward Elric the moment he's finished killing that little shit.</p>
<p>[Referential spoilers for mid-series of either 'verse.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Simple Things

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "abandonment issues"
> 
> Credit where it's absolutely due – I wouldn't write this pairing this way if it wasn't for the unbelievably enjoyable work of [lightgetsin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lightgetsin/pseuds/lightgetsin). Or without Eltea, but that sort of goes without saying. :D

If Roy had expected this to be easy—or normal, or simple, or low-key, or comprehensible in any capacity—he would officially be an idiot of the highest caliber.  As it is, he’s just a little bit completely fucking stupid for wading in despite his expectations.

Fullmetal shoots him what must be the single most venomous look that a post-coital teenager whose hair is tangled in his face and who just mewled during orgasm could muster.  He curls up a little smaller, all of his extraordinarily flexible limbs folding in around him; Roy is reminded of bank vaults, assaulted animals, and the way Venus flytraps cinch shut.  None of these associations is particularly encouraging.

“Okay,” Edward says. “So now what?”

It’s not okay. It is deeply not okay.

Roy takes up his good silk robe from the back of his desk chair, shoulders it on, and loosely knots the tie around his waist; regardless of what they just did (i.e engaged in filthy-hot-desperate intercourse all over virtually every centimeter of Roy’s not-inconsiderable bed), Fullmetal does not need to be treated to a view of Roy waltzing around the room naked. Caution seems especially pertinent given that Roy tends to have a fairly remarkable sixth sense for Edward’s often-violent and always turbulent emotions; currently, the boy on the bed is emanating waves of awkwardness and shame so visceral that they melt at their edges into fear. Some part of Roy has accepted without a moment’s hesitation that his primary responsibility now is damage control.

He fetches the nice, thick terrycloth bathrobe from the closet.  It still smells faintly of lavender despite two washings, because its last wearer’s perfume was _that_ strong (and once made Roy so dizzy whilst necking that he had to make excuses and go get some air in the restroom, which is a story for another time or more likely never). With any luck, the scent will prove soothing instead of damning.

Then again, that was sort of how he’d intended the entire night to be, and the results of those intentions are plain enough.

Edward is scraping with his fingernail at a groove in his automail knee. He does not look up, even when Roy approaches with the air of one trying to feed a kitten which has previously clawed one’s eye to the brink of oblivion.  He does, however, flinch when Roy drapes the robe over his shoulders, and then he hunches a little smaller, his hand taking a break from fidgeting with the automail to pull the fabric closer against his cheek. It’s almost unbearably adorable, which is sort of how they got into this whole mess.

“What takes place now,” Roy says slowly, “is up to you.”

Edward gives him a look he recognizes—the calculating one, for gauging opponents and targeting their weaknesses.

“Sure,” he says. “Just—” His head tilts down again, and his hair falls in front of his eyes. “Just don’t tell Al, all right?”

“I wasn’t planning on telling anyone,” Roy says, folding his arms to anchor them—to cement himself, and to stop his hands from reaching out to touch. “Which is not to say that it’s a secret; I merely don’t see a reason to broadcast it. You’re welcome to speak about it if you like, although I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention to my team how easy I am to get into bed.”

Edward’s nose, just visible through the curtain of hair, wrinkles, and his mouth quirks. “Yeah,” he says, holding the robe shut and slipping to the edge of the bed with that goddamn _unfair_ natural grace. “You’re kind of a whore, Colonel.”

“That’s no way to speak to your commanding officer, Fullmetal,” Roy says.

“Tough shit, Colonel,” Edward says, looking everywhere but at him. “But—well, if nobody knows about it, it’s like it never happened, right? Where’s your shower? I’m kinda… sticky. And stuff.”

“Wait a damn second,” Roy says, gripping his sleeves so that he doesn’t go for Edward’s wrist. “It _happened_ , and we’re going to acknowledge that like adults.”

Edward scowls. He looks twelve. Roy wants to die. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Roy says through clenched teeth, “that I do not have one-night stands.”

Edward’s eyes harden, and then he whirls on his metal heel and flounces off towards the bathroom. “You do now! I hope you enjoyed this limited-time trial of my services; please fill out a customer satisfaction card and leave i—”

Roy tackles him to the floor.

About half a second before his face hits the carpet, he realizes that there were probably other ways he could have conveyed this message. About half a second after his face hits the carpet, he’s glad he paid outlandishly for the extra-thick bristles.

Edward is already flailing. “What the _fuck_ , Colonel? Get your fat ass off of me! You had your fun; now leave me alone!”

Roy pins him by his tiny mismatched shoulders. With a swathe of sweat-dampened hair in his face, the trademark lion-cub snarl, and a gleam of fury in his eyes as he writhes, Edward is even more maddeningly enticing than he was a few hours previously. But there isn’t time; and if Roy kept having him until he couldn’t walk, the team would _definitely_ know; and… and dear God, that’s _not the point_.

“Stop,” he says. “You don’t get to dodge this one. Talk to me, Fullmetal. Why are you trying to run away from this?”

“Because I realized I just got seduced by some ugly-as-sin military dog,” Edward says, narrow hips colliding with Roy’s knee in a way that makes the bottom of his stomach drop out. “I need to cleanse myself. And curse the heavens. And wallow in regret. And whatever else sullied maidens do.”

“You are not a sullied maiden,” Roy says, a small part of him admiring the sheer absurdity of his having to utter the words; “except in the most ludicrously technical sense. What’s wrong with you?” That’s much easier than _What’s wrong with_ this _? What’s wrong with_ me _?_

“I told you,” Edward says, which is clearly untrue. “You’re a shitty lay.”

“All right, first of all, if you were a maiden, you have no grounds for compari—”

“ _And_ ,” Edward says, “you’re a dick. Just get _off_ me, Colonel; I already told you I’m sticky.”

‘Magnetic’ is the word Roy would have used. “I know precisely why you’re going for the shower,” he says. “What I don’t understand is why you’re so desperate to _go_. Why can’t—” He keeps it casual. “—this be… part of something larger?”

Edward eyes him like he’s suggesting they try to take Drachma armed only with toothpicks. “Are you… asking me out or something? Like, on a date? Because I don’t have time for dates. Or for you.”

Roy fights the urge to hang his head in dismay. “Fullmetal—just—yes. I’m requesting that you allow me to treat you as more than a one-time sexual partner, because I’d like you to _be_ more than that.”

Edward is now eyeing him as though his heated flush is making strange designs upon his cheeks. “You mean… you… want me around?”

_Somewhat in spite of the fact that you’re an infuriating little bastard—_ No.

_In defiance of the abject cries of my jilted better judgment—_ No.

_My God, Edward, do you have any idea how few things I_ wouldn’t _do to get you into bed again—_ Oh, hell, no.

He takes a deep breath, lifts his hand off of the automail shoulder, and touches Edward’s cheek. One thing about this can be simple. “Ye—”

The automail knee slams into his groin.

Once the densest constellations have stopped bursting on his eyelids, and the sound of his own howling has ceased to ring in his ears, Roy curls up and whimpers for a short while. That done, he clambers back into sentience and duly notes that he’s probably more than a bit in love with Edward Elric. Additionally, he’s going to murder the little fucker with his bare hands, tan his filthy hide, and nail it to the door as a warning to anyone else who threatens Roy Mustang’s personal favorite of his numerous bodily organs. After that, he hopes Fullmetal will be willing to go out to dinner of an evening. At some place that caters to skinless corpses.

Roy is delighted about his own paranoia as he drags himself up to his feet by the doorframe and applies his hands to the faint chalked-on array below the light-switch. Downstairs, Fullmetal’s thunderous footsteps careen to a stop, and he shouts in wordless frustration as the front door seals itself before his eyes.

“This is unlawful imprisonment!” Fullmetal calls. “Doesn’t that make this whole thing kidnapping? You sick fuck, Colonel! Was this what you wanted all along?”

“You perpetrated assault and battery on a superior officer,” Roy says, wincing as he convinces his very displeased body to start for the stairs. “I think we’re even. More pertinently, you don’t have any clothes on, and I wasn’t finished with our conversation.”

He heads the staircase and looks down, steeling himself not to cringe at the way that everything below his abdomen throbs like a raw wound. He can see that cornered animal edge on every perfect line of Fullmetal’s body now; Edward is feral, fiendish, and radiant. He darts a glance towards the kitchen—assessing the likelihood of a back door, no doubt—and then glares mistrustfully at Roy and fingers the collar of the robe.

“I was going to transmute this into a toga once I got out to the street. Damn it, Colonel; if I’d known you were so demanding afterwards, I wouldn’t have jumped into bed with you.”

The way the yellow-headed dynamo moaned in the back of his throat when Roy pressed him against the wall and sucked at his collarbone speaks volumes to the contrary, but Roy has judiciously decided to take the high road. Also, minimizing the verbal provocations should markedly reduce the odds of Fullmetal hacking through the door with his arm-blade and running off into the night wearing a transmuted toga. One way or another, Roy needs to buy himself a fairly substantial quantity of time for limping feebly down these stairs, and caution is his friend.

“Edward,” Roy says as he eases himself down the first step, “considering the innumerable mission reports in which you have gleefully refused to offer any of the information I actually want—much as I do appreciate the North City souvenir umbrella you sent me ‘for useless days’—you owe me at least one honest discussion. Wouldn’t you ag—”

“Never mind about the shower,” Edward says, shoving his hands into the pockets of the robe and starting across the foyer away from the stairs. “I’m starving. Where’s the kitchen?”

The agony muddles Roy’s discretion. “Slow _down_.”

Edward snorts, which—like his temper, his egoism, his stubbornness, and his flippancy—should be off-putting. “Yeah, right, you old geezer. Man, I hope your fridge isn’t full of prune juice.”

Roy’s more concerned about the bottle of absinthe in the cupboard, especially when he hears some of the cabinet doors bang open and shut. Damn these stairs. Damn Fullmetal. Damn his own helplessly tender… sympathies.

There’s a pattern here—submerged and half-stifled, but Roy has spent three years now parsing Edward’s silences and psychoanalyzing the snark. There’s something nebulous in his cupped palms, some explanation carved out in negative space, and he can _almost_ wrap his hands around it.

He drags his tortured body towards the kitchen in pursuit. “If you’re hungry, let me make you something. Don’t just… start eating.”

Edward is sitting on the countertop, evidently having rooted out the well-hidden bar of extra-emergency dark chocolate, since the end is halfway to his mouth for a second bite. He’s lodged his metal heel against the delicate cabinet handle, and the panel above is deeply scraped from his attempts to gain purchase.

“Too late,” he says.

He beams, eyes bright and sharp, and takes another bite.

Roy almost gives in, gives up, and crushes the shadow of an answer in his grasp. If it wasn’t for the fact that the sudden deep breath originally meant for a scathing dismissal sends a spasm of pain down his inner thigh, he’d probably be at Fullmetal’s throat, earning ‘dog’ and ‘whore’ and all of the things Edward’s not quite jaded enough to have thought of— _callous_ , _distant_ , _cold_. But the pause for self-pity steadies him, even if Edward is chomping through his emergency chocolate with unholy enthusiasm, and the smoky tendrils solidify.

Roy stares dumbly, like it’s all new. Perhaps it is, now that he’s torn away the blurry layer in between.

“I’m not going to leave,” he says.

Edward blinks and then goes entirely still.

“That’s what it is, isn’t it?” Roy asks. “People… leave you. Your father left, and your mother died, and… And Alphonse—he’d follow you into hell, and he proved it, but you almost lost him to it. And you’re terrified that when you set things right, he just won’t need you anymore, and he’ll leave, too. People who fight for you—” He holds it together. “—end up dead, and then they’re gone before you have a chance to say goodbye. So when it came down to this…” To a collaborative research meeting that just _twisted_ somehow; to the looks they were sharing; to the way Roy’s pulse was beating in his throat, and Edward’s eyes were gleaming; to the slow and deliberate swipe of the boy’s tongue across his bottom lip so that Roy just couldn’t _take_ it anymore; to the mad, tangled stumble-rush down the hall to the bedroom; to Edward’s hair knotted around his knuckles and Edward’s sweat on the tip of his tongue… “You expected me to leave. And you decided that the best recourse was to abandon ship first, before I had the chance. Before I hurt you, like people always do.”

The silence is thick with the vulnerability of an unmasked magician, of a fragile thing exposed.

The remaining quarter of the chocolate bar _fwump_ s unceremoniously to the kitchen floor, which is even more of a waste than Edward scarfing the whole thing.

Roy swallows and summons at least a fraction of a smile. “Sorry, Fullmetal,” he says. “You’re going to have to do a great deal more than throwing a tantrum to get rid of me.” The light reflects blindingly off of Edward’s steel shin, and Roy can’t help following the suggestive lines of darkness that draw his eyes up under the robe. “And,” he says levelly, “if you determine at any point that you prefer our relationship to be strictly professional, we can put this experience behind us, but I will still not be going anywhere.” He pauses. “And I will still be demanding your damn reports. Speaking of which, I actually wrote up a backlog of the ones you owe me.”

Edward hops off of the counter—which makes the robe flutter so tantalizingly that Roy’s mouth waters without leave—and picks up the fallen chocolate. “Well,” he says, brushing at it and then blowing on it, “I… dunno. I mean, it kind of depends on whether you’re ever going to figure out how to get that stick out of your a—”

“ _Don’t eat that_!” Roy cries, lunging forward to snatch the chocolate away. “It was on the floor!”

Either he’s turned into an alien, or Edward is not impressed.

“Besides,” Roy says, as authoritatively as he can manage, “if you eat nothing but chocolate for dinner, you’ll make yourself ill. Sit down. What would you like to drink?”

It is tremendously unsurprising that Edward is still standing when Roy has dispatched the contaminated chocolate and, mindful of the Fullmetal Alchemist’s famous eating habits, nearly emptied his refrigerator for supplies.

“Colonel?” Edward says slowly and—if Roy is not mistaken—with a taint of uncertainty.

Roy stops fussing with leftovers and focuses on him. “Yes?”

“Are you sure about this?” Edward asks, eyes roving over his face. “I mean… I can’t have been very good. And I kneed you in the gonads—which you totally deserved, by the way—and then pretty much busted into your kitchen and made myself at home. Plus I still wanna use your shower, and Al says I always leave a ton of hair in the drain.” Rarely has Roy learned a more predictable personal detail. “Plus, like… don’t you go through women like Havoc goes through cigarettes?”

“First of all,” Roy says, “that analogy is unsound, because cigarettes are disposable, and human beings are not. Additionally, I don’t throw my ex-girlfriends in the gutter when I’m finished with them—which Havoc shouldn’t be doing either; I keep telling him he’s going to start a fire. All of that aside, you may have noticed that my close relationships, with friends and employees, almost _never_ change. I don’t ‘go through’ people, Edward. I have a reputation as a womanizer because it makes me seem weak to my competition; and because I do genuinely appreciate the distractions that trivial liaisons provide. The women I date know that the arrangement is temporary.” He reaches out and tugs gently on a lock of Edward’s impossible hair. “My relationship with you is anything but temporary, although its precise nature is up to you.”

The sharpness to Edward’s eyes when the indomitable mind behind them shifts into analysis makes Roy’s nether regions heat precipitously regardless of the recent abuse.

“Okay,” Edward says carefully. “But what do you want?”

“I want you to eat something other than my chocolate,” Roy says, entirely truthful; “and then I want to be the one who gets to teach you how grownups have fun.”

Edward’s eyes narrow as he picks through the euphemism. Roy is going to have to drag himself back into the habit of saying what he means. “So you… want… to be my boyfriend.”

There’s something both heartbreakingly cute and subtly perverted about the way the innocent word rests on those full, precocious, well-bitten lips. Roy isn’t sure which aspect he likes more.

“That’s right,” Roy says. “But only as long as you’re comfo—”

The sudden weight of Edward leaping on him and crushing their mouths together almost sends them both toppling, but Roy catches the edge of the counter in the nick of time.

“Good,” Edward says, as briskly as possible around the panting, when they break apart. “Because I sometimes really like you when you’re not being a total douchebag, and apparently you can do some pretty amazing stuff with your hands.” His pout is intoxicating. “Aw, jeez, now I’m going to have to do a bunch of sex research so I can be good at it. And you better hurry up with the food, because I still want to take that shower. I hope you have another bathrobe; I definitely got chocolate on this one.”

Roy is officially a first-rate idiot after all. On the upside, he hadn’t expected imbecility to be nearly so satisfying.


End file.
